City employees shouldn't get special treatment: Letter

Re: "City staff will have to start paying up; But already-accrued fines are forgiven," Page A3, March 2.

Continued violation of traffic laws by public employees should be an easy way to identify which employees should be terminated because of their danger to public safety and their exposure of the city to liability and damages for accidents, injuries and deaths due to reckless driving like speeding and running red lights.

More than likely, it would make more sense to the public if tickets were not issued to police vehicles (marked or unmarked) and firefighting vehicles. Someone is reviewing these pictures, right?

I completely understand why the city is not going to reveal which employee has which vehicle -- do we really want a public record of which cops have unmarked vehicles? I think not. However, a list of all vehicles, their owners and the amounts of unpaid fines should be public information. Public shaming is a powerful tool that we don't use effectively.

I hope the real issue is that all the tickets issued to city vehicles are being mailed to the same address at the city and there is no mechanism to sort them out in a reasonable period of time. I suggest that the city attend to fixing this problem.

I also suggest that these tickets be automatically paid out of that city department's budget, without review. That should properly motivate "supervisors" to insist that employees stop this behavior and would create a written record giving the city grounds to terminate these undesirable employees. Do I need to point out how a normal business deals with employees who get traffic tickets for running red lights or speeding in company vehicles?

I also suggest that the city consider adding an administrative first layer written appeal process for these tickets that does not require anyone to take time off work to appeal a ticket.

Treating run-of the-mill employees, i.e. persons not responding to a public emergency, differently than the general public is very bad public policy and the stuff that revolutions are made of.